The Amateurs (12 page)

Parker liked the sense of power he felt as his oar moved through water. Like Tiff Wood years later, he sensed immediately that this was something he could be good at, that its basic requirement was passion and dedication. In his freshman year he weighed 160 pounds and rowed on the lightweight crew. By chance Joe Burk was coaching the freshman lights that year, and by his sophomore year Parker was in the varsity heavy boat. Joe Burk had found his protege.

Burk had a sense that Parker's physical commitment was exceptional. But there was something more than just physical commitment. One of Burk's earliest memories of Harry Parker was of a young man working on his oar in the tank. Parker was gritting his teeth so hard that he drew blood, and even though the blood was running down his mouth, he paid no attention to it. He just kept on rowing. No one Burk had ever coached had as much passion for rowing, not just to do it but also to live it all the time. On weekends Parker and a friend would walk the eight miles to Burk's suburban house to talk rowing. Parker kept complete logs of everything he had done as an oarsman, and these logs reflected a remarkable knowledge of the sport. They were a coach's logs.

Without realizing it, Parker had modeled his life on Burk's. Like Burk, Parker was reserved and aloof yet passionate. He had felt at home with Burk because this was so natural a manner for him. He was emulating what he already was. He had entered Penn thinking he would become an engineer, but he had fallen in love with his liberal-arts courses and decided he would go into teaching when he graduated. But he owed time to the Navy for his ROTC scholarship, and guided by Burk, he moved over to sculling while in the Navy. Joe Burk taught Harry Parker how to scull, and it was said that in the late 1950s, when the two of them went out every day, Burk, by then in his midforties, could still take a length lead on the younger Parker and hold it every time. ("I think that was true," said Parker, "though we weren't
really
racing. The amazing thing is that ten years later he was still doing that to the top scullers in the area.") Parker did better against others, becoming the Pan-Am champion in 1959 and the American sculler at the 1960 Olympics, where he was automatically in the shadow of Vyacheslav Ivanov, the great Soviet oarsman.

With the possible exception of Pertti Karppinen of Finland, Ivanov was the greatest sculler Harry Parker had ever seen. If someone had been designing the prototype of the sculler, he would have designed Ivanov. He was six-four, long-limbed, immensely powerful in the back and legs, with great endurance. He was also beautifully coached. When Parker went to Rome in 1960, Ivanov already had the first of his three gold medals, which he had won at Melbourne in 1956 at the age of eighteen in an extraordinary race with his only true rival of that era, Stuart McKenzie of Australia.

Their exceptional rivalry, which lasted for several years, eventually flowered into real friendship. If Ivanov was perfectly built for rowing, McKenzie was not. He had a barrel chest, long arms that seemed to swing down to his knees, and curiously clumsy body movements. In the Melbourne race, McKenzie, then only nineteen himself, had taken a huge early lead and had stayed in front almost the entire race. Near the end, Ivanov had made what was to become his patented move, an all-out charge. Steadily he passed boat after boat. When he passed Jack Kelly, who was second, he had a sense that Kelly turned his face away so that Ivanov would not see the pain in it. Steadily Ivanov gained on McKenzie. Then, right near the end, McKenzie stopped rowing for a moment. He simply had nothing left. A split second later Ivanov, equally exhausted, stopped. Then both resumed. But Ivanov was just a little bit ahead and won.

A year later, McKenzie took his revenge. The two were at Henley, and they were playing chess together. In the middle of the chess game, McKenzie gave Ivanov quite an odd look. He had just learned something crucial about his opponent. Ivanov, he had decided, played chess the same way he rowed. He cannot play methodically— he needs the cavalry charge. With that, McKenzie decided to go to a much higher plateau of speed against Ivanov, to exhaust him so there would be no final burst. It worked. He won the Henley race by .02 second. Ivanov jumped out of his boat and swam over to congratulate McKenzie; but rattled by the defeat, Ivanov rowed poorly for the next two years, constantly changing his pace.

By 1960, he had regained his rhythm. He and McKenzie, good friends now, worked out before the 1960 Olympics on Lake Albano, and McKenzie realized he could not possibly beat Ivanov. McKenzie had one silver, and he did not seek another. He did not row in the Olympics, but Harry Parker did.

Ivanov, then twenty-two and in the Soviet Army, was a figure of awe to Parker. The Olympics being about friendship and fellowship, they even had a brief conversation. Some of the Soviet sweep oarsmen were Lithuanians who still thought of themselves as Lithuanians and who spoke a little English. They told Parker that Ivanov badly wanted to meet his American competitor, and they coached him in what to say. Parker, good Olympian, had memorized these words and gone over to Ivanov. They had shaken hands. Ivanov had beamed with fraternal sports pleasure. Parker had beamed with fraternal sports pleasure.
"Sukin syn,"
Parker had said in his instant Russian. Ivanov's face had fallen, and he had become chilly. A decade later, watching the scene in the movie
Patton
where the general said the same thing to the Russian generals, he realized he had said "you son-of-a-bitch" to Ivanov. It had not been so fraternal after all. In the intervening years, Harry Parker had thought often of Ivanov; the one thing Parker was almost certain of was that Ivanov had not been sent to Afghanistan with other Soviet troops.

Coming out of the Navy, still subtly guided by Burk, Parker decided to take a job as the freshman rowing coach at Harvard. It was a pleasant place, where he could work on a Ph.D. and coach at the same time. He believed the job would be temporary. Temporary it was. Two years later, the Harvard varsity rowing coach, Harvey Love, died of a heart attack, and Harry Parker was named head coach. He was twenty-eight. That year, 1963, Yale was heavily favored. Harvard won. It won the next eighteen times in a row. Thus began the myth.

CHAPTER

TEN

So on the weekend in Princeton he was coach of all the scullers. His Harvard crews would have to wait. Most of the top scullers had been working out in Cambridge, where the facilities were particularly good. Parker had tried to be meticulous in not favoring his former Harvard oarsmen, something he was often accused of by disappointed non-Harvard rowers. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of each of the competitors. Biglow had powers of concentration that were complete. He was totally unflappable before a race, he never doubted his ability and he loved to race. As long as he believed in himself, he would be all right. He was not as smooth a rower as he should have been, but his strength and his sense of purpose made up for that.

What made Tiff Wood so strong was determination. There was no way that Tiff Wood could give any more than he did; he punished himself to the ultimate level. Two or three inches shorter than Biglow, Wood should not even have been a world-class sculler.

Bouscaren pushed himself just as hard as Wood but in other ways. Bouscaren was the smoothest of the three, and in the past year he had brought his endurance level up dramatically. He was bright and sensitive, quicker than the others to feel slighted, probably because he was not as big. In 1983, after Wood had won the singles, they had all gone to the national team's sculling camp. It had been an aggressive camp, and at one point Parker had tried both Biglow and Bouscaren in a double. Because their boat had not been particularly fast, Parker had moved Bouscaren out and another oarsmen in. Bouscaren had immediately gone to Parker and asked, "Do you think John is more effective in the team boats than I am?" So that's it, thought Parker. Bouscaren needed to have parity with Biglow; and as long as they were in the same boat, they were peers. If he was out of the boat, there was a problem.

Roughly forty young men were competing in the single-scull trial; another forty were rowing doubles in races that would entitle them, if they did well, to go to the sculling camp and compete for the double or the quad. Theirs were not official races; however, the single trial was. The first day of racing, Friday, was devoted to the heats. There were seven heats, with six or seven oarsmen in each. The winner of each heat would automatically advance to the semifinals. The others, in case the heats had been unfairly seeded, would row in the repechage the next morning. There would be six heats in the reps, and the winner of each would also be in the semifinals. The problem, of course, was that the semis would be rowed later that day.

Few surprises were likely in Friday's heats. Wood and Biglow were considered cofavorites for the final, with Bouscaren just a shade behind. The second tier consisted of Jim Dietz, the former U.S. single sculling champion, and Brad Lewis, who had rowed in the U.S. national double the previous year and who had worked out the past winter in California.

Jim Dietz was thirty-five, and he had been rowing competitively since he was seventeen. He had twice been the American single sculler at the Olympics, in 1972 and 1976. He had not been a major figure in sculling since 1980, but in 1983, with the Olympics beginning to appear on the horizon, he had started to push himself again, and in the 1983 American single trials he had come in second to Tiff Wood, 4.4 seconds behind, beating both Bouscaren and Biglow. Until the 1983 race he had been trying to wean himself from rowing by taking a job on the American Stock Exchange. But his 1983 race had been too encouraging. The flame of Olympic glory had flickered just enough to keep him rowing. In 1984 he had been rowing a lot of miles, but he had not really been racing—that is, punishing himself. He thought he knew the field better than anyone else; they had been beginners coming forward when he had been in his prime. He considered Wood the strongest; if they raced five times, he was sure Wood would win at least three races. But he also thought Wood vulnerable. There was immense pressure on him as the defending champion; and everyone was gunning for him, a position Dietz knew all too well from his own years as a champion. In a single, winner-take-all race, what he hoped to do was catch the younger men by surprise while they were preoccupied with each other, row one great race and win. He believed he had that one great race in him; his problem was that it took him longer and longer to recuperate. If he was caught in a tough heat, he would use up his energy there. That was his problem. More than anything else, he had to conserve his energy.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

The other rower in what was generally considered the second tier was Brad Lewis. The word from California by way of the rowing grapevine (Mike Livingston, a former Harvard oarsman, had been coaching him, and Mike's brother Cleve was living in Cambridge and still rowing and connected to everyone at the Harvard boathouse) was that Brad Lewis was rowing very well. But in the past he had shown a tendency to wear out; and besides, he was from California and practiced there rather than in the East. In a sport where regional prejudices were powerful, he was not taken quite as seriously as if he had been rowing on the Charles. It was all right to
be
from California, no one could really help that, but to continue to train there indicated that an oarsman was probably not entirely serious. It hinted at an inverted value system; for in a world where the Puritan ethic was as operative as it was in rowing, the idea of California, particularly
Southern
California, conjured up visions, no matter how unconscious, of a softer and more indulgent life-style.

Lewis was a complicated and sometimes difficult young man. He was not at ease with the other oarsmen, who were eastern in shape, form and manner, and they in turn found him moody. He was passionate about the world of rowing and largely estranged from most of the others who inhabited it. This year he was almost pleased that no one was taking him that seriously.

He wanted to surprise them during the single trials. He had virtually sneaked into Princeton and had made no effort to be sociable. On the first day when he had gone out on the water, Joe Bouscaren had rowed by. "Hey, Brad," he had said, genuinely pleased to see him, "how are you?" Lewis had not answered. "Come on, Brad," Bouscaren had said, "say hello." Still there was silence. Lewis kept rowing. "Stop rowing!" Bouscaren said. "Now! Stop rowing!" "I can't," Lewis said, "I'm in the middle of a piece." He rowed by. Well, thought Bouscaren, that's Brad, still psyching himself up. Brad Lewis, who hoped to be the
other
Lewis at the Olympic games, the one who did not get on the cover of
Time
magazine, was appalled by the idea that the other competing scullers had traveled to Princeton with their rivals, Biglow with Bouscaren, Wood with Altekruse.

Lewis's concept of rowing did not permit such fraternization with the enemy, and to him, the men he was rowing against for something as precious as this were the enemy. If most of the other oarsmen, such as Wood and Biglow, pushed themselves into rowing because they wanted to belong to something, wanted the camaraderie and a form of social acceptance, Brad Lewis pushed himself because he wanted to remain apart. The Lewis men, said his cousin Mitch Lewis, who accompanied him as his coach, therapist and trainer, are independent. They do not like being a part of things and get nervous in organizational charts. They will work very hard for something as long as no one tells them what to do. "I think we're black sheep," he said. "We always have trouble with coaches. We love to do what people tell us we can't do, and we don't like to do what people tell us we should do."